FREEdom TO CHOOSE 2011

Ronald E. Findlay
Ragnar Nurkse Professor of Economics
Columbia University

Ronald Findlay joined the faculty of Columbia in 1969 as a visiting professor and since 1970 as a professor of economics. He specializing in international trade, economic development, and political economy, he has written extensively on those topics. Some of his work includes "Input Trade and the Location of Production" with Ronald W. Jones in American Economic Review (2001); "Modeling Global Interdependence: Centers, Peripheries, and Frontiers" in American Economic Review (1996); "Government, Trade, and Comparative Advantage" with Richard Clarida in American Economic Review (1992); "The Roots of Divergence: Western Economic History in Comparative Perspective" in American Economic Review (1992); "The State and the Invisible Hand" with Stanislaw Wellisz in World Bank Research Observer (1988); and many others.

Professor Findlay holds a BA from Rangoon University in Burma (1954). In 1960 he earned a PhD from MIT. At Rangoon University, he was appointed a tutor in economics (1954-57), a lecturer in economics (1960-66), and a research professor of economics (1966-68).

His recent book (with O'Rourke), Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton Economic History of the Western World) provides the "first systematic, integrated, analytical account of the evolution of the international economy during the last millennium. It emphasizes the two-way interaction between trade and geopolitics, and the importance of such interactions for world economic development".

Sean Turnell
Macquarie University
Sean Turnell is a former senior analyst at the Reserve Bank of Australia who has had a long-time interest in the role that financial institutions can play in economic development. A specialist on Burma and its economy, Sean has been an advisor and consultant to a number of government departments, multilateral finance and development agencies, various international NGOs, and he has testified on Burma before the US Senate and Congress. He is co-founder and editor of Burma Economic Watch (BEW), the author of numerous academic papers on Burma and other developing countries, and has been a regular contributor to such publications as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist, and other international and local press. Sean is likewise a regular commentator on Burma and the Asia-Pacific region on the BBC World Service, Radio Free Asia, the Voice of America, the Democratic Voice of Burma, Radio Australia, and other broadcasters. His book on Burma's monetary and financial history, Fiery Dragons: Banks, Moneylenders and Microfinance in Burma, was published in 2009 by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.
Currently an Associate Professor in Economics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Sean Turnell has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, the Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

Jeremy Sheamur
Australian National University

Jeremy Shearmur is a former assistant of Karl Popper's; he taught philosophy at Edinburgh, Political Theory at Manchester and the ANU, and was also Director of Studies of the Centre for Policy Studies (London), and Research Associate Professor at George Mason University. He has wide academic interests, especially in social philosophy and in 'critical rationalism'. He has published The Political Thought of Karl Popper and Hayek and After, and was co-editor of Karl Popper, After the Open Society. He is currently finishing editorial work on Larry Briskman's Problems and their Progress, working with Geoff Stokes on The Cambridge Companion to Popper, and also working on his own volume, Living with Markets. In 2009 he was a Senior Research Scholar in the Center for the History of Political Economy in the Department of Economics at Duke University, and he expects that work that he undertook there on Hayek's intellectual development will be published in a series of papers.

Rod Tyers
University of Western Australia

Rod Tyers has recently moved from the Australian National University to take up a Winthrop Professorship at the University of Western Australia Business School. Trained originally in engineering at the University of Melbourne, W/Prof. Tyers made the transition to economics and completed his doctorate at Harvard University in 1978. His research in international economics has emphasised economy-wide analysis and he has addressed issues including commodity market stability, technical change, demography, trade policy reform and macroeconomic policy as it affects exchange rates. He has published extensively in international journals and takes a particular interest in the Chinese economy.

Patrick Jory
University of Queensland

Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History at the University of Queensland. His research interests focus on Thai cultural and political history, and Islam and Muslim Society in Southeast Asia. He has spent over ten years teaching and working in the Southeast Asian region. He is co-editor of Thai South and Malay North: Ethnic Interactions on a Plural Peninsula (2008) and Islamic Studies and Islamic Education in Southeast Asia (2011).

Peter Warr
Australian National University
After receiving a PhD in 1974 Peter Warr was Postdoctoral Fellow in International Trade and Economic Development at the University of Minnesota. Following that he taught economics at Monash University from 1976 to 1979. He joined the Economics Department, RSPAS, ANU, in 1980 and has been the holder of the John Crawford Chair since 1989. Professor Warr's research includes general equilibrium of Indonesian and Thai economies, especially as regards the relationship between economic policy and poverty incidence. He is the author of three books and over 120 articles. 

William Coleman
Australian National University

William Coleman is a Reader at the School of Economics of the Australian National University, and has written extensively upon inflation, the history of economic thought and upon the contested position of economics in society.

The book he authored in 2006, Giblin's Platoon: The Trials and Triumph of the Economist in Australian Public Life, won the Bruce McComish Prize for Economic History. His Economics and Its Enemies, The story of two centuries of anti-economics  won an Outstanding Academic Title of 2003 award from Choice: Current Review of Academic Books. His most recent book The Causes, Costs and Compensations of Inflation has just been re-issued, in paper back

He has also written extensively as a web columnist for the Social Affairs Unit, and as author of op-ed pieces for the Australian, the Australia Financial Review and the Age.

He has been CEO of the History of Economic Thought Society of Australia, and is currently the editor of Agenda: a Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform, and President of the ACT Branch of the Economics Society of Australia.